Mariupol has become one of the main symbols of resistance from Ukraine during the war with Russia. Located in the Ukrainian southeast, the city has been besieged by bombs of the Russian Army, with 100,000 people remaining caught in the locality and live in “subhuman” conditions, without food, without water and without medicine, according to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Since the first day of war, last February 24, Mariupol has been a fundamental objective for the russian troopswho throw some hundred bombs a day in the locality, without distinguishing between the civil population. In fact, Russian bombing has reached the hospital from maternity of the city and the theater Drama, where hundreds of civilians and that it displayed the word ‘children’ in the garden to avoid attacks. So far, the municipal authority quantifies in more than 3,000 the dead civilians in the city, besieged on all sides.
Despite being the tenth largest city in Ukraine – with more than 430,000 before the invasion began a month ago – about half of the population is russian and Mariupol has a paramount importance for Moscow troops. In fact, like Odessa, Mariúpol also has access to the sea -in this case to the Azov sea, which communicates with the Negro-, which makes it a key seaside town for Ukraine’s foreign trade, with the export of grain, iron and steel from the largest commercial port in the sea of azov.
Economic and symbolic importance
The city is also key to the steel industry, as it has the largest plants in this sector in Ukraine. In this sense, last Sunday Russian troops damaged one of the largest steel and metallurgical factories in Europe, Azovstal, located in Mariúpol.
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In addition to serving to block the economy Ukrainian, the town is also a point of reference for the total control of the region of the donbas -formed by the provinces of Donetsk and Luganskself-proclaimed independent republics by pro-Russian separatists – by the Moscow Army and that would serve to have a land runner between this region and the annexed crimea.
Likewise, the taking of Mariúpol also has a symbolic importancesince the city is the base of the Azov battaliona paramilitary group neo-Nazi Ukrainian, and the invasion of Russia began with the aim of “denazify” Ukraineaccording to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.